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By Marijcke Jongbloed


  Many years ago when I was preparing to come and live in the Middle East I scoured the bookshops in Amsterdam for anything that could teach me about Arabia and the Arabs. I could not find anything of a recent date, but there were several older books that dealt with the subject. By chance, one was a coffee-table photo book about Al Ain, the city I was heading for. I gazed at the pictures of sand dunes, palm groves and animals suqs. The text was minimal and although my appetite was whetted, I was no wiser.

  Then I discovered a series of books written by a lady named Freya Stark. They were a sort of diary written in the years between the two World Wars and told of daily life in Aden and adventurous excursions into the Hadramauth Mountains of Yemen. The descriptions of landscapes and of village life in remote areas were fascinating. The language was beautiful, detailed and poetic, as people of that era tended to write.

  Since that first discovery 30 years ago, I have read these books again several times, enjoying them even more after I had gained my own experiences in this part of the world. In the course of time, I began to hear more about other exploits of the author – a truly remarkable lady. She was 84 when she travelled down the Euphrates River in Iraq on a raft, visiting the Marsh Arabs shortly before the large scale destruction of the marshes by Saddam Hussein’s government. When the BBC wanted to film her adventure she scoffed: “It is only a sailing trip, nothing special!” She lived to be a hundred and each of those years was packed with adventure.

  Freya Stark was born in 1893 in Paris. Her parents were English artists who were bitten by the travel bug. As Freya’s biographer puts it so aptly: “Her cradle was highly mobile”. With her parents she travelled throughout Europe, settling for short times in England, but spending most of the time in Italy. She went to College in the UK and served as a nurse and a censor in the World War I. After her parents divorced, her father gave her a small house in Italy and there she set up a small business, growing vegetables and fruits for the markets. She used every cent of her earnings for language lessons – starting with Arabic and Farsi. Soon she set off on the first of her adventures – long treks through Syria, Persia, Palestine and Yemen. Her most audacious trip took place in 1928 when she was 35 - the first woman to explore Luristan in Western Iran. She travelled alone into the forbidden territory of the Syrian Druze, after having trekked across the infamous Valley of the Assassins. Her first book (The Valley of the Assassins) was written describing this journey, commenting in a lively way about the people, places, customs and history she learned about. The book made her famous and provided her with a grant from the Royal Geographical Society. This enabled her to make a second trip in the late 1930’s into the hinterland of Yemen, resulting in “The Southern Gates of Arabia” and “The Dust of the Lion’s Paw”– the books that I found in the Amsterdam book shop.

  During the Second World War Freya Stark worked for the Ministry of Information, contributing to the creation of a propaganda network, where her knowledge of local languages was useful in counteracting Nazi influence in Arabia, Egypt and Iraq.

  In 1954 – she was then 61 years old – she was travelling in Turkey where time and again she came across traces of Alexander the Great. It seemed to her that these signs often contradicted the accepted history of Alexander’s march through Asia Minor. So she decided to research Alexander’s route extensively, checking the geographical facts with the traditional records for inconsistencies. With two Turkish guides she travelled first by jeep and then on horseback, crossing the sparsely populated southern Taurus with its steep passes, the deep canyons in the high karst-plateaus and the snow-covered mountains, following the route that Alexander the Great took so many centuries before. The trips are recorded in three of her most well-known books: “The Lycian Shore”, “Ionia – a Quest” and “Alexander’s Path”. With her entertaining accounts of the history and culture of the region she managed to bring to life an era that laid one and a half thousand years in the past.

  During travels in the Empty Quarter of Oman, she re-discovered the ancient route of the incense trade and predicted the site of some of the great cities of antiquity, which are only now being excavated, right where she said they would be.

  All in all she wrote 30 books, each one telling a story about somewhere in the Middle East. The Times of London called her ‘the last of the Romantic travellers’ and at the age of 82 she was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, from then on having the right to call herself Dame Freya Stark.

  In an interview given to Betty Green, a journalist of Aramco World Magazine, Dame Freya told of her time with the nomad Bedu she camped with:

  “For one thing, they are very pleasant to be with. They have certain manners that I think are delightful. You don’t have to talk all the time. If you have something to say, you say it. They can sit with a circle of twenty people, quite quiet and silent, who haven’t anything much to say. And then, if someone has, they say it. These pleasant pauses are so agreeable that one is inclined to get into the habit and it isn’t the thing at all in a European drawing room!”

  And: “I have never heard a Bedu interrupt another in conversation. Conversation is a whole art which, I have a theory, comes from the fact that the lighting in their tents has never been good enough for reading. You can’t really do anything but sit and talk.”

  She loved the Arabic language: “I enjoy Arabic. I don’t speak it at all elegantly but I enjoy it immensely. There is very great beauty in the language; it is a most poetic language. It is incredibly rich. That is really the difficulty of learning it - the very great quantity of expressions.”

  When asked about her view on Arab women, she said: “They were very kind to me always. I like Arab women. And, of course, I feel women are just as influential when they are shut up as when they are let loose. I think we run the world wherever we happen to be.”

  When asked in 1984, after her return from her rafting trip on the Euphrates, whether the Arabs she travelled with were interested in their history, she explained it thus: “They are, but they are not documentarians as we are. We are becoming wedded to the document. I don’t think they care about it. They care about the feeling. It is perhaps the old-fashioned way. They are very proud of memories and of course they are a believing people. Religion is still a great force; they have respect for their religion. People will tell you that this is old-fashioned and that you hear nothing but about oil and money...but I noticed that among the young people we were with (and they were most of them young) that when you got to know them they were just the same as I always remembered them, with a very strong belief that perhaps we used to have and lost: a belief of being entirely in the hands of Allah, of God, so that human decision becomes subordinate.”

  In one of her later books ‘Riding to the Tigris’ she motivates her desire for travelling:

  “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a pictures in a frame, or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art. .. Most people try to avoid having their feeling intensified; for indeed one must be strong to place oneself alone against the impact of the unknown world”.

  Freya Stark lived up to her name – ‘stark’ is the Germanic word for ‘strong’.

  She was a strong woman, a woman who used her talents for languages and observation to open up the world of the Arabs, until then hardly known to Europeans, and to generate appreciation for the mysterious Middle East. Her compassion and sense of humour, her patience and adaptability allowed her to go where few men, leave alone single women, had travelled before and to make friends with wild tribesmen, gentle Bedu and city people alike.

  For me she has been a role model, both in her writing and in her life-style.

   

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